Replying to Ed Zubrow's post about prof. S. Drury urging listeners to
simply think of music as, "the experience of absorbing sounds,"  Jon
Johanning wrote:

>Great advice!  (By the way, you don't have to confine it to modern music.)
>The problem is, it seems that so few people can follow it.  I think this
>accounts for the lack of popularity of this kind of music--most people
>(even many CM fans) need to associate the sounds with something else
>(emotions, ideas, mental images, or whatever) in order to get into a
>comfortable relationship with it.  But so much contemporary music is
>specifically designed to frustrate all such attempts.

I see another endless argument over Comtemporary vs.  Everything Else
coming!

I have given a lot of thought lately as to why the Romantics, Late
Romantics, and Early Contemporary composers have such an ability to make
me, (and many others), swoon--and yet most music before and after leaves
me cold, or registers just a "nice." Why is the time between @1840-1950
so potent for me and others?

Maybe this is the answer.  I talked long ago about the Dominant listener,
(type A), vs. the Submissive listener (Type B), (which Stirling built upon
in a recent posting without giving me credit), where I explained that the
Submissive associates music with his own experiences while the Dominant
simply experiences the sounds.  A Dominant can enjoy music from all periods
while the Submissive will logically gravitate towards music that is easily
associative.

It can be argued that all music was once just sounds--but gradually early
composers *did* started creating extra musical associations--the march,
chorale, the waltz, minuet, fanfare, pastorale, etc.; which gave later
composers the luxury of having these associations already in place in the
listener's mind, paving the way for distortion and irony.

Playing with these associations to make some sort of extra-musical
statement is what makes listening to the Romantics and Early Comtemporaries
such a meaningful and potent experience for me.  Who can forget what
Strauss and Prokofiev did with the waltz? Mahler and Shostakovich with
the march and chorale? Grainger with the pastorale? Janacek with the
fanfare? Britten with bi-tonality? Tchaikovsky substituting a sad adagio
for a spirited finale? Berlioz.....

It has been necessary to move on.  Maybe modern music will slowly lend
itself to new associations, though as I write this I wonder: If earlier
music was borne out of the rhythms of body movement and speech patterns
and inflextion, can Modern music, which eschews everything inherently
"human," (no scarcasm here), ever be associative? If one wants it to be?

John Smyth